The building of a concrete wall by the Serb authorities near their side of the bridge that ethnically divides the Kosovo town of Mitrovica was ordered to stop after strong criticism by Kosovo Albanian officials.

Kosovo Serb political party leader Oliver Ivanovic, jailed for nine years for war crimes, told Pristina’s appeals court that his trial was unlawful because he had already been investigated over the same offence.

Relatives of one of two men killed for being ‘traitors’ by the Kosovo Liberation Army offered what they said was new evidence after guerrilla commander turned MP Fatmir Limaj was indicted over the murders.

In its annual progress reports, the EU urged improvements in war crimes prosecutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo, and expressed concern about a slowdown in finding missing persons from the 1990s conflicts.

David Schwendiman, chief prosecutor of the newly-established specialist court that aims to try former Kosovo Liberation Army members for 1990s crimes, will make his first official visit to Serbia and Kosovo this week.

At his first-ever meeting with families of Kosovo Serbs who went missing as a result of the war, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci pledged to address the missing persons issue during talks with Belgrade in Brussels.

About

The Balkan Transitional Justice initiative is a regional initiative which has been supported by the European Commission, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office FCO and Robert Bosch Stiftung that aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice issues in former Yugoslav countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia).